


I've been hurt, and we've been had

by coldhope



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, More tags as they apply, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-24 10:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2578256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Maintenance is required</i>, he says again, and the earpiece still does not reply. </p><p>This is the longest he has been out of cryo in what passes for his memory. Once or twice before he had been injured during missions, and gone into the ice before bruises could spread and darken on his skin; when he came out again, he would be repaired, all hint of damage taken care of by the things they dripped into his veins. Vaguely he is aware that people can heal without the chair and the tank and the IVs, that he is special and not anyone else in the world is quite like him, but he does not know how people go about the business of healing. <i>Be functional</i>, he tells his right arm, and again receives no reply.</p><p>Time, presumably, passes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Another look at what the Winter Soldier might have faced after the fall of Hydra/S.H.I.E.L.D., this one focusing on what "completing the mission" actually signifies, and what happens if he fails to achieve that goal. Sam Wilson will almost certainly show up.

_The man at the back of the queue was sent_  
 _to feel the smack of firm government_  
 _Lingered by the fly poster for a fight_  
 _It's the same story every night_  
 _I've been hurt and we've been had_  
 _You leave home and you don't go back_

_Someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday_  
 _Wait until tomorrow and there's still no way_  
 _Read it in a book or write it in a letter_  
 _Wake up in the morning and there's still no guarantee_  
\--Pet Shop Boys

~

He has only needed to carry a method of measuring time on his solo insertions, where he is expected to carry out time-sensitive missions and reach his extraction point when scheduled. Time as a linear flow beyond mission parameters has never been part of his larger awareness. He knows, because of the difference between night and day, that it is passing, but he does not know how many nights and days it has been since the river; only that it is _many_. 

He keeps expecting to hear commands from the little black metal-and-plastic thing that fits into his ear, but since the river it has made no sounds at all, no replies have come to the questions he has asked. 

_Control,_ he says, again, touching the little black earpiece. _Control. Asset reporting in._

No response, only a distant sighing that could be wind in wires, or nothing at all. _Asset reporting in. Maintenance is required._

He knows that he has had to perform certain aspects of maintenance himself before now, and that after he had left

_the man on the bridge_

at the edge of the river, he had wrenched his right arm back into place; remembers that it had hurt very badly, an awful somehow fibrous tearing sensation and a _thunk_ noise accompanied by a burst of burning, tingling numbness up and down the whole arm. It had hurt badly enough to make him retch, the way he sometimes did when the fluid thawing in his ears sent the world spinning and swaying with vertigo, only nobody held a basin under his chin or restrained him so he wouldn't fall forward into his own sick.

Eventually the worst of the pain and nausea had receded, but the arm still hurts; he cannot raise it above the shoulder, or lift anything heavy. 

_Maintenance is required_ , he says again, and the earpiece still does not reply. 

This is the longest he has been out of cryo in what passes for his memory. Once or twice before he had been injured during missions, and gone into the ice before bruises could spread and darken on his skin; when he came out again, he would be repaired, all hint of damage taken care of by the things they dripped into his veins. Vaguely he is aware that people can heal without the chair and the tank and the IVs, that he is special and not anyone else in the world is quite like him, but he does not know how people go about the business of healing. _Be functional_ , he tells his right arm, and again receives no reply.

Time, presumably, passes. 

He has found clothing that covers his battered combat gear, hides his face. He finds a way into the museum, stares at words he has to make himself remember how to read. A face printed on glass, huge, a good four feet from chin to forehead, looks off into the distance over his head, and he can only barely see his own face reflected in the glass, superimposed, just sharp eyesockets filled with shadow, a nose, roughly stubbled jaw. It doesn't look remotely like the face printed on the other side. 

_(your name is james buchanan barnes_ )

The man on the bridge is also the man on the bridge of the Helicarrier and both of them say words to him, look at him with eyes he so nearly remembers. He closes his eyes tight, tight, and the words and the eyes go away, and soon afterward so does he; too many people, too many questions. 

_Maintenance is required_ , he says, no longer to the earpiece. He has taken it out and found that the tiny speaker was silent and dead, drowned in the river. It is never going to answer him. Perhaps no one is there to answer him; perhaps everyone is gone, all of it is gone, machines standing silent in the rooms of ruin. The thought is terrible, and he pushes it away.

His ability to thermoregulate is malfunctioning. Sometimes he shivers violently the way he has always done while coming out of the cold, even inside two layers of grimy sweatshirt over his leather combat gear. Sometimes he thinks he is in Madripoor because the wet heat sends sweat trickling down his back and stinging his eyes, makes it hard to breathe. It is often hard to breathe, and that is also something that is not right but he's not sure what to do about it; he has not been exposed to tear gas or any other irritant that he can remember, but the involuntary fits of coughing seem to be getting more and more difficult to control. Coughing hurts his bad shoulder, his ribs. He thinks if he takes off the leather jacket that he will find there are bruises across his throat and chest and side that have not yet faded despite however many days and nights it has been. 

He is in alleys; he is on rooftops, peering down at the bustle of real people going about their lives with no idea that the asset is watching them; that the asset, if he had the correct equipment and could stop shivering long enough to get a decent bead on any one of them, could drop them with a single shot. He does not have equipment anymore except some knives, not all of them, but some. It is better than no equipment. 

He is in parks. There are others who do not have a place to be, who are there because there _is_ no place that they belong. They smell and look the way he smells and looks. He attracts no attention except for the cough, and then it is mostly just a vague sort of acknowledgment of his presence. 

He is on streets, increasingly uncertain of his ability to continue functioning without maintenance. It is very dark and there are few cars: he thinks it must be an hour when most people are sleeping. A good hour. He leans on a bench and drifts for a little while and when he opens his eyes again he recognizes the shapes and angles of a building across the way; the recognition builds piece by piece until finally the correct label is found and attached. He is looking at the building which contains the vault. The vault. The vault, where there is the chair. 

He is stumbling across the street and nearly trips into the way of a yellow car which sounds its horn violently, ringing through his head and sending all the other sounds bouncing and clattering. It hurts, it hurts all through him, echoing in his right shoulder. He acknowledges that it hurts and that this is a negative feedback but right now the only thing he has to do is get into that building, get into the vault, because in there they will _repair_ him. 

It's locked, with a chain and padlock through the doors. He looks around: no one is there to watch as he tears the steel chain like paper and pulls the lock free. Inside there is yellow tape strung on things, and it says DO NOT CROSS on it, but that does not apply to him: nothing applies to him when he is on a mission. 

He finds his way down to the familiar steel door and pulls it, too, open, and stops, swaying, his breath bubbling and crackling in his chest. This is wrong. This is not correct, the vault should be full of green light and screens and people in white who do things to him. The only light is from a few bare bulbs which buzz at him as he takes a step and another step, unsteady, his shadow huge and shocking on the floor tiles which should not be littered with metal and glass and wire but which, unaccountably, are. But there is the chair. 

There is the chair. 

He gives a long sigh, or starts to, because it sets off the cough reflex and it is a little while before he can straighten up and wipe his streaming eyes and really _look_ at the chair, and see what he had not registered before: that the wires leading to it are cut. The screens beside it are dark and silent. 

Shaking his head in dumb rejection, negation, he stumbles forward and half-falls into the chair, its hard padding so familiar, so _familiar_ against his back and legs and arms. He blinks and it's busy and bright again, people are talking; blinks again and he is alone, in the dim remains of his erstwhile home. The earpiece will not speak to him because there is nobody to give it voice. He _is_ alone in the rooms of ruin. Alone, and suddenly so terribly cold. 

Somewhere water is dripping, and the rumble of the occasional car on the road above shakes a little more dust down from the ceiling tiles. Breathing hurts. Everything hurts. 

He leans his head back against the rest that does not now close around him and light up with blue fire, and goes away for a little while.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it bears mentioning that I wrote this in the departure lounge of an airport at half past seven in the fucking morning, so if there are any terrible parts, blame temporospatial disconnection.

_Only last night I found myself lost_  
 _by the station called King's Cross_  
 _Dead and wounded on either side_  
 _You know it's only a matter of time_  
 _I've been good and I've been bad_  
 _I've been guilty of hanging around_

_Someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday_  
 _Wait until tomorrow and there's still no way_  
 _Read it in a book or write it in a letter_  
 _Wake up in the morning and there's still no guarantee_  
\--Pet Shop Boys

~

He supposes these are dreams, because they don't last. They are fragmentary, forming at best a mosaic image, made up of tiny individual broken pieces; the picture they do make is one that he does not quite recognize but wants, badly, to see closer up. 

Bitter chill, and a radiator that clanks and hisses but gives little heat; a body pressed against him, too thin and sharp-edged, that _does_ give heat like a small and shaking furnace. Dark-gold hair damp with sweat. The slant-light of afternoon through old slatted blinds, falling in bars across tumbled blankets on a bed, each ray catching the random mindless dance of dust-motes. He is holding the other person, the very precious and fragile and infuriating and above all _dear_ person, and thin fingers curl round a fold of his shirt and cling tight. 

_No._

A different kind of cold, and he is holding not a thin blue-eyed boy but the reassuring solidity of a rifle, lying in a snowy nest and looking down a scope at...

_No._

...at someone he knows, he knows that he knows but he cannot find the name and trying hurts badly enough even in the dream to make his stomach lurch. Watching the person in his blue and red and white uniform, with his blue and red and white shield, and exhaling on a slow measure, squeezing his rifle's trigger. The report is sharp, and the man in the suit looks up as a black-uniformed figure across the little valley tumbles from its own sniper's nest. The man in the suit, the man with the shield, who has dark-gold hair and blue eyes through his scope...

_No._

...meets his gaze, and flicks a little salute, and he racks the bolt and returns to watching silently in the snow. 

The swaying, racketing floor of a train carriage beneath his feet. He is holding the shield

_why is he holding the shield_

and leveling a pistol at another black-clad figure glowing with blue light; and then the whole world shines blue and gravity thrusts itself at him with the force of a ram and he is dangling over an unknowable space by his left arm, reaching desperately up, reaching for the hand the man in the suit is holding out to him, and the rail to which he is holding lets go. 

The man in the dark-blue coat falls; the man in the filthy sweatshirt, alone in the dripping darkness, jerks awake, the echo of that last scream bouncing off the walls of the vault. His throat is on fire. He has been screaming, too. 

He can't catch the rhythm of his breathing properly, gasping, each attempt to inhale catching terribly in his throat and chest; he coughs and coughs, awful ragged sounds like fabric being torn, and black spots and bright sparks chase one another across his vision. Eventually it eases, and he lies in the chair with his eyes closed, seeing again things he does not consciously remember seeing; things that his head does not recognize, but something deeper and less reasonable insists that he knows. 

Exhausted, he drifts a little, briefly, and in the doze he understands what it is he must do. 

_You're my mission_ , he had said, looking into that upsettingly familiar face. 

_Then finish it._

He had not finished it. He had...stopped, his hand stilling, drawn back for another crushing blow; and in that moment the floor had given way beneath them both and the man with the dark-gold hair and the blue eyes was falling away, dwindling, the way a train had dwindled from another falling man a long unknowable time ago. He had not finished his mission. He had...done something he does not understand even now, has no idea why it was that he dove after the falling man and found him, and dragged him to the surface, to the shore. That was when everything had begun to go wrong and strange and unfamiliar. 

_Finish it._

He has never not completed a mission and now he knows what happens when he fails: everything breaks, everything hurts, the chair and the vault no longer recognize him. All of this is his fault. 

And all he has to do is find the man, and finish it, and _he can have it all back_ , all of the terrible frightening strangeness will go away and he will be able to stop thinking with the blue light of the headstorm that means a wipe, everything will go simple and clear again. 

The idea of the inexpressible relief of _not having to think_ is so sweet, so profoundly inviting, that it pushes him up and out of the chair and up the stairs past the _DO NOT CROSS_ tape and out into the darkness of the larger night. It is raining, cold light touches that feel wonderful on his burning face. He knows what to do, and that is almost as good as being back where he belongs. 

~

He has been here before. Not inside, but he has seen through the windows as the one-eyed man crumpled with three slugs in his chest. He recognizes the building, recognizes the window through which he had looked to make the shots. There is light there, and a shape moves inside. _Target acquired_ , he thinks. He does not have a gun, he does not even have his good knives, but he has one blade left and one blade will be more than enough if he can just get in close enough to strike the blow. 

Access to the building is almost suspiciously easy. The stairs give him some difficulty, however, and he has to stop on the landing, left arm wrapped around himself, struggling to breathe in a careful rhythm that won't start the coughing again. But he manages. He manages the last stairs up to the door, and his silver hand curls into a fist, and knocks.

 _Dimly he is aware of the strangeness of the situation. One does not simply knock on one's target's front door. A lot of things are strange. He is appalled to find that he is almost getting used to strange, but it still prickles terribly inside his head._

The door swings open on warmth and light, and _the man on the bridge_ is _the man in the suit_ is _the man with the shield_ , and the asset stares, swaying, into blue eyes that widen in shock to meet his own. The target is wide open, frozen in surprise, perfectly set up for the asset's attack. Training drives his right hand with the knife-hilt forward, up to bury itself in the chest of 

_steve_

his mission, and for a wonderful moment he believes he has succeeded. Then a hand like iron closes over his right wrist, and the shock goes all the way up to his bad shoulder and flowers in a sickening bloom of pain that wrings a choked cry from him. The knife falls, useless. Continued failure mode; maintenance required, maintenance required, _maintenance required_ \-- 

Blue eyes and dark-gold hair and that smile, that terribly familiar smile fade first behind sparkly grey, and then behind black.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to rainbowbarnacle, specialshera, and luninosity for reading over this mess and helping me make it less messy. (From another standpoint, y'all would be classified as _enablers_. Please feel free to continue enabling me.)

_So I went looking out today_  
 _for the one who got away_  
 _Murder walking round the block_  
 _ending up in King's Cross_  
 _Good luck, bad luck waiting in a line_  
 _It takes more than the matter of time_

_Someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday_  
 _Wait until tomorrow and there's still no way_  
 _Read it in a book or write it in a letter_  
 _Wake up in the morning and there's still no guarantee_  
 _There is still no guarantee_  
\--Pet Shop Boys

A series of moments, like beads on a black thread, like islands in a black sea, points of light in a vast world of darkness:

Heat, astonishing heat all around him, yielding but resistant, not air but water. Something is touching his face, his head, working through the matted snarl of his hair. It isn't the chair because the chair was never warm and the things that touched him were hard and businesslike, not tentative, not gentle. He does not know where he is. 

~

He is lying on his back, like the chair's reclined position, but still not in the chair because it is still warm and it is soft, awfully soft, like a cloud around him, and he is afraid he will sink into that softness and feel it close over his head. Light hurts his eyes when he tries to open them: not the green light of the vault, but bright white, fuzzy and blurred. He is afraid, very afraid, and then something cold touches his right forearm and there is the familiar pain-prick of a needle and _that_ is right, finally, something is right, and he goes away again with the beginning of hope that he has not failed completely, that he will eventually be repaired. 

~

A confusing, terrible dream: the train, the rail, the fall, over and over. Blue eyes, blueness filled with stars. He is on fire, he is in the cryo tank freezing too slowly, his bones ache. He is parched-dry in a burning desert, and something cool touches his face: something that does not turn into the blue crackle and flare of the chair's headpiece, but just rests gently against his forehead, and it seems to make the dreams, the falling, fade into nothing at all.

Now out of the darkness he is abruptly choking, convulsed with uncontrollable helpless coughs that won't let him draw in breath. The chair had trained panic reactions out of him, but this is bad enough that the conditioning stretches thin over the rising tide of physical terror, he can't breathe, he cannot _breathe_ and

something lifts him from the frightening softness, something warm and strong as iron bends him over and holds him steady while something else hits him on the back over and over in a steady rhythm and the clogging thickness in his chest suddenly starts to move. There is a very awful moment when he really _does_ choke, and then the stuff stuck in his throat comes up all at once and suddenly he can gasp in air that hurts like acid, like knives in his chest. He can't see much through the tears filling his eyes, just that white light. Whatever is hitting his back stops, turns into a firm warm rubbing that helps calm the remains of panic. He is exhausted, his shoulder and sides aching, and the dark emptiness rushes back and takes him down with it.

~

People talking over him, around him. It isn't the chair and it isn't the vault but he hurts less, he hurts much less, and although breathing is still difficult and the coughing still comes in heavy fits he has not had another terrifying choking episode. Time is passing, he realizes. Time has passed, and what has been happening is that he is being repaired after all; despite his failure, despite everything, he is finally receiving maintenance. 

He opens his eyes. It's still too bright and his head aches, but he can focus now, and his observation and recall functionality clicks on: he is lying in a bed, which is strange, and the two people at the other end of the room are not in white coats or the black of Hydra uniform. One is vaguely familiar, but not quite right, and it takes him a few moments to understand that this is because the man is not wearing his metal wings. The other...

_You've known me all your life._

The shield, falling away. Blue eyes in a mask of blood. Blue eyes in a thin face, too thin, meeting his: _I can make it on my own._

Holding a bony, frail body against his own in the chill of midwinter, hearing-feeling breath rustle and crackle beneath his hands, wishing so much that he could breathe _for_ him, that he could take this all away and bear it himself instead of having to see

_(Steve)_

him struggle like this, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair _at all_...

That face again, swimming out of the green darkness in a poisoned room: _I thought you were dead._

_I thought you were smaller_ and fire, blazing fire, an abyss made out of fire and _no, not without you_ , never without you, never in life, and now again the train and the rail and the scream: the end of the line.

All of it roars through his mind with the completely unstoppable force of gravity, of the blue lightning of a wipe. He must have made some sound because the two men stop talking amongst themselves and turn to him, and then his mission is there, _right there_ sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at him with those inimitable eyes and saying something he can't hear over the storm in his head. If he had any of his knives he would be able to finish his task right then and there and complete the mission and be able to _stop_.

_But the mission objective is wrong_ , he thinks, astonished at being able to think at all; the thought is as clear and undeniable as any of the programming had ever been. _It was always wrong._

"Bucky," his mission says, again. There is a sense of sudden, abrupt, clear connection: somewhere in his head a coherer's resistance drops and a signal is registered and received. "Bucky?"

Because it was always him, wasn't it? Always the blue-eyed boy, always _Steve_ ; Steve has always been his mission. Keeping Steve warm in the bitter winters, making sure he had _something_ to eat even if it wasn't actually _nice_ , finishing the fights he started, holding him through the grueling asthma attacks, watching by his bed hour after anxious hour as he tossed and turned, glowing with fever. And later, in another life, picking off hidden soldiers with their rifles trained on him; fighting at his side, moving in the safe shadow of his shield. It comes back, it all comes back, and he is helpless in the face of such a flood of memory all at once. It is like drowning, like the moment of terror when he had literally been unable to breathe, but the terror doesn't last; once the wave has rushed over, through, past him, he is left blinking and astonished and something closer to whole than he has been in decades.

"Bucky," Steve says again, and reaches out to him, but stops: there is still space between them, a few inches left between Steve's hand and his shoulder, as if he doesn't quite dare make contact. It could be miles, that space, could be a couple thousand feet straight down; he is intensely, dizzily aware of something like the pull of gravity. " _Say_ something."

"You...dropped your shield," is the best he can come up with. His voice is a total wreck, cracked and ragged; he clears his throat painfully and tries again. "On the, the--" He can't dredge up the word _helicarrier_. "Thing."

Steve gives a startled little laugh that has tears in it. "I got it back afterward. It was you, wasn't it? You pulled me out of the water. Saved my life."

"You're my mission," says Bucky Barnes, and Steve goes very still. 

The blue eyes are confused, heartbreaking. Steve's face needs to be touched right now, immediately, and he can only make his left arm work reliably at the moment, so he reaches over to run his metal fingers over the cheekbone they had broken some time in the recent past. Steve's stillness changes subtly, and then he leans just a little into the touch. Bucky can't feel texture, but the warmth of his skin is there, real and human and delightful. "Right mission," he says. "Wrong kind of...objective. It was supposed to be _watching_ you. Never knew when to run away from a fight, so I had to...fucking wade in after you, every time."

"You...remember now?"

He nods. "Not...all of it. Head's full of pieces. I know...maybe who I am. It's...I might forget again." 

He _knows_ he will forget again, with the inevitability of falling; knows he won't be able to hold on to this space and time. Knows, too, that once remembering has been done for the first time, it will be possible to do it again. All he has are chances, nothing's promised, nothing certain; but chances are all anybody ever gets. He thinks he had once known that, and forgotten it--along with all the rest.

(In the lurching, dizzy time after the river, there had _been_ certainty: one thing to do, one outcome to achieve, no chances to take or be given. _If_ he completed his mission, _then_ he could be repaired; no other options. Without that binary white/black filter the future appears vast and strange and full of potential terrors, and also--just as terrifyingly--full of possibility.)

"I'm with you," Steve is saying, covering Bucky's metal hand with his own, holding it to his cheek. "I'll be with you, I'll help you remember." His eyes are still so blue, bright and clear with that dark ring around the iris. Looking at them makes time blur again. "I promise."

Bucky smiles, an expression his face is not used to: it feels strange. "Where are we?"

"My place. You've been pretty sick, you showed up at my front door a week ago with a temperature of 104 and tried to stab me before you passed out. You, uh. Your right shoulder was a mess. I did that."

He looks down and realizes the reason he can't use the right arm is that it's in a sling. "Oh," he says. "Well. Pretty sure I kinda broke your face, not to mention shooting you a couple times, so I think we're probably about even."

Now there really are tears in Steve's eyes, and he can't bear that, so he is glad when the man without wings comes over to join them and says "Hey." Bucky remembers kicking him off the deck of a helicarrier, and is vaguely glad to see that this doesn't seem to have been all that fatal. 

"Hey," he replies. 

"How you feeling, man? You were walking around with a pretty hardcore case of pneumonia, it's just as well you got here when you did."

Bucky looks down at himself again. The time between the river and now is hazy, unclear except for that black/white certainty of what it was he must do; the part before that, between the train and the river, is a confused patchwork of times, places, people. "I needed maintenance," he says.

"You sure as hell did. We got you fixed up, but it's gonna take a little while before you're back on your feet."

"You repaired me?"

"We took care of you," Steve corrects. "Like you always did for me. Like friends do."

"Friends," he repeats, tasting the word. It isn't quite right, but it will do; it will do for now. As long as Steve doesn't go away, as long as he can look into those eyes again and see himself reflected, even changed as he is, he thinks--for the first time in seventy years--maybe his mission parameters might finally be met.


End file.
